This is meant with the sincerest of urges to help. I have a similar situation, and pondered much the same issues. However, I'm extremely short of time as it is. I decided that my needs would be best served leaving the data on those backup DVDs and CDs in case I needed it. The "in case I need it" is something that hasn't happened to me for over fifteen years now, largely because I'm careful with what I'm working on at the moment and backing to other disks.
You might first want to install DVDisaster to scan those old disks and see if they're still self consistent. Some of them may not be readable at all, or only partially readable. And as to automation for reading: I recently ripped and archived my entire CD collection, some 500 titles. Not the same issue in terms of data, but much the same in terms of needing to load/unload the disks. I went as far as to think of getting/renting an autoloader, but I found that it was much more efficient to keep a stack by my desk and swap disks when the ripper beeped at me. This was a very low priority task in my personal stack, but over a few weeks, there were enough beeps and minutes to swap the disks out. It's very tempting to use a neato tool - and zfs is a major neat one! - when there's a task to be done. However, sometimes just scratching away at a task a little at a time is almost as fast and much cheaper. Now, how did you say you set up dedup? 8-) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
